City Navigator & custom topos

[+NOV8TR]

I have been happily geocaching with a “free custom topo” (1:24) loaded on my Vista HCx. The topo is awesome for off road caching (even if it is just a big city park). However I decided it would be nice to have some road navigation available for when I leave my car nav system behind (bicycle caching).

So, I recently purchased “City Navigator 2008” and loaded it onto my Etrex Vista HCx. I must say that I’m pretty disappointed with the auto-routing features (it does not recalculate alternate routes when I miss a turn or “take a shortcut” very well). It also does not seem to be able to transition between “routing” and “geocache” modes without ending a pre-routed navigation session (several waypoints). I haven’t found a way to easily back out of “routing” and mark a cache as found. Granted I’m a bit spoiled as far as auto-routing, because I’m used to the simplicity and ease of use with my touch screen Tomtom car nav system. Never the less, it seems silly to be forced to “end navigation” in order to “go to” a geocache “off road”, just to have access to the “found” button on the compass, to log a find on the calendar. If I’m missing something, somebody please set me straight (the manual is useless). I can live with that inconvenience if necessary, it just seems that I must be missing something.

What I really would like to know is how to have my “custom home made” topos available on the same SD card as the City Navigator. I have plenty of room on the 2 GIG card, so that is not the problem. Right now because I can’t figure out how to load both at the same time (one writes over the other), I have to carry an extra SD card with just my topo loaded, in addition to the one with the City Navigator on it. I use City Navigator to route me to the general cache area, then power down the system, pull off the battery cover and switch SD cards, then power the system back up to gain access to a topo for the trail work required to find a cache. Can anybody shed some light on this problem for me? Is there some software that will merge two (or more) IMG files that may not be “Garmin sanctioned”? I’ve tried “mapwell”, “sendmap”, and one other one that I can’t remember the name of right now (I’m not at my home computer). Mapsource will not recognize my “custom” maps, so it is of little help. Am I the only one with this problem? Has Garmin tied up the IMG format so tightly that it will not play with anyone else? Is there a way to trick Mapsource into thinking that my custom topo is a legitimate IMG file?

Thanks in advance for your replies!

[SiliconFiend]

<snip>

I haven’t found a way to easily back out of “routing” and mark a cache as found. Granted I’m a bit spoiled as far as auto-routing, because I’m used to the simplicity and ease of use with my touch screen Tomtom car nav system. Never the less, it seems silly to be forced to “end navigation” in order to “go to” a geocache “off road”, just to have access to the “found” button on the compass, to log a find on the calendar. If I’m missing something, somebody please set me straight (the manual is useless). I can live with that inconvenience if necessary, it just seems that I must be missing something.

Well, you do have to route to a cache off-road in order to be able to mark it as found, but you can save some keystrokes. While your "follow road" route is active and the map page is displayed, Press the Menu button and select Recalculate, then choose Off Road (your routing setup has to be configured for "Prompted").

What I really would like to know is how to have my “custom home made” topos available on the same SD card as the City Navigator.

<snip>

Is there some software that will merge two (or more) IMG files that may not be “Garmin sanctioned”?

<snip>

You have to load them both at the same time. Look at MapSetToolkit to get your custom map into MapSource.

[+NOV8TR]

Alright! Thanks to Siliconfiend for the tip about turning off the “automatic re-routing”. That might just work for me (unless I miss a turn?). The manual is so abbreviated, I’m never quite sure what results to expect from any of those obscurely worded menu commands! Never the less, it is just more of a bother than I thought it should be.

The good news (for me at least) is that I figured out how to get my custom topos and City Navigator loaded (and working) on a single SD Card! It turns out that none of the upload programs recognize my custom topo as a legitimate file (some say it is too big for virtual memory, one says it can not open the file because “0” level can not be empty, and MapSetToolkit requires several other files to be included like “TYP” and ”FID #” etc..).

I can load my topo straight onto the SD Card with windows via USB port (mass storage configuration) and it works just fine. So, what I did was create some folders on my computer hard drive, and after loading the section of City Navigator that I was interested in (the “Country” of California in this case), I then copied it to a folder on my computer. Then I deleted it from the Garmin folder in the Vista HCx and copied my custom topo back into that folder (via USB mass storage link). Then I used Mapwell Mapupload to “add” the City Navigator to the Custom topo already loaded on the Garmin Vista. It took almost 3 hours worth of processing to blend that combination (I suspect that the USB interface in the Garmin was the bottleneck), but it loaded and shows up as independent and individually selectable map sections on my Garmin Vista. Yippee!!! No more “field swapping” of SD Cards for anything I want to do in California anymore! I am still going to try and figure out how to get Mapsource to recognize my custom topo, and I’m sure that MapSetToolkit is the way to do it. It will just take me a while to figure out how to generate all the missing parameters that that program wants to see.

Edited June 11, 2008 by 1XL-on-XR650L

[SiliconFiend]

Alright! Thanks to Siliconfiend for the tip about turning off the “automatic re-routing”. That might just work for me (unless I miss a turn?). The manual is so abbreviated, I’m never quite sure what results to expect from any of those obscurely worded menu commands! Never the less, it is just more of a bother than I thought it should be.

The good news (for me at least) is that I figured out how to get my custom topos and City Navigator loaded (and working) on a single SD Card! It turns out that none of the upload programs recognize my custom topo as a legitimate file (some say it is too big for virtual memory, one says it can not open the file because “0” level can not be empty, and MapSetToolkit requires several other files to be included like “TYP” and ”FID #” etc..).

I can load my topo straight onto the SD Card with windows via USB port (mass storage configuration) and it works just fine. So, what I did was create some folders on my computer hard drive, and after loading the section of City Navigator that I was interested in (the “Country” of California in this case), I then copied it to a folder on my computer. Then I deleted it from the Garmin folder in the Vista HCx and copied my custom topo back into that folder (via USB mass storage link). Then I used Mapwell Mapupload to “add” the City Navigator to the Custom topo already loaded on the Garmin Vista. It took almost 3 hours worth of processing to blend that combination (I suspect that the USB interface in the Garmin was the bottleneck), but it loaded and shows up as independent and individually selectable map sections on my Garmin Vista. Yippee!!! No more “field swapping” of SD Cards for anything I want to do in California anymore! I am still going to try and figure out how to get Mapsource to recognize my custom topo, and I’m sure that MapSetToolkit is the way to do it. It will just take me a while to figure out how to generate all the missing parameters that that program wants to see.

Yeah, you'll want to get MapSetToolkit working (sorry, I've never done it myself) because I'm pretty sure that Mapwel didn't include the routing information from City Navigator, which is a huge loss. As far as I know, only MapSource can combine and upload routable maps. It's possible sendmap could do it (www.cgpsmapper.com), but I don't know.